Dreams

Note: This will be an incremental post.



1. Broadly 2 types, Lucid dreams and non-lucid. Lucid dreams are easier to remember whatever little we do. Non-lucid are just random neuron activity which touches a lot of memories and probably the brain tries to stitch up a story on-the-fly in quick hindsight, making sense of things that aren't meant to be. Lucid dreams don't make more sense, but you clearly feel you're playing a part, either active or passive, either actor or observer, it feels like your watching a movie and you can analyze and respond to various scenes, you kinda know that this is a dream(some of the time) and sometimes even make it a point to remember it, only if u try real hard and tell your mind that I want to remember this dream can u hope for the tiniest recollection.

2. Different postures, different places ---> Different dreams.
If you sleep facing(feet towards) south, you will have high dream activity, you u face sleeping west probably you wont have nice dreams, facing north is normal activity, facing east don't remember, probably less dreams:p
I normally sleep over my friend's places a lot, there was one particular house of Jaat where he stayed for a year or more, I always used to get dreams of an actor or some drama, some art thing, the theme was always the same each time. Once I slept at this horrible place called Kasol in HP, which is full of pot-smoking Israelis I had the most potent dream of skulls/death/yam-dev. Every place has got an aura, certain vibrations/waves, an environment and it definitely interferes with your mind waves. Also if somebody's sleeping close by, his waves/dreams can interfere yours, I once asked Jaat did he dream of Italy and he said yes, he was enjoying the detailed architecture at Rome IIRC;).

3. There is no sense of real time in dreams. There is no relation between how much time is passing outside in the real world and within your dream.
for e.g., when I was young I often fell of my bed and every time I fell, I remember having the dream of walking on a mountain ridge, the ridge is getting thinner and then its as sharp as razor blade and then I fall, it seems like hours or at least a long time, but my falling off the bed would have been just some fraction of a second, the brain reconstructs a whole scenario, how brilliantly fooled we are by our minds:).

4. I sometimes get dreams which has to do something with what happened the previous day, that plus some hidden memory plus some activity makes up something, but most of the time my dreams main elements, actors and other components come from my long-term memory, things that have long past gone, if not that things that have/had the slightest impact on me, things that I am/was sure are not important sometimes are the main highlights, that surprises me very much, it like the brain is scanning itself and found hidden things behind the corner attic, wonder whats the trigger/key.


5. When you need to wake up at some pre-determined time, if before sleeping you make a mental note of the time you want to get up, invariably the sleep is not as deep as otherwise and astonishingly the internal wake-up call works like a charm with an error-window of an hour at the maximum. The sleep not being as deep or fulfilling one tends to get more dreams.

6. Updated [December 9th 2011]: The kind/type of dream you get also depends on the exact time at which you go to sleep. It seems like the human dream is related to the cosmic dream (what in sanskrit is called maya). Its just a bunch of waves/equations that have a lot of parameters and something inexplicable happens as the output. The same should hold for research I guess, lot of research work/reading/exploring might not give a great idea by itself, but one incident of waking at the wrong time, going to a shop in a unusual roundabout way, watching a man fall asleep on the train, might just spark an in inexplicable chain of events that lead to that idea. Well, I dont believe that so much, it has to be more deterministic, more like what Littlewood says.
[Today I went to sleep at 10AM and woke at 4pm, I dreamt something completely different from anything I remember from before, i.e. I would classify this dream in a *new* category]